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The console wars have been lost

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Re: The console wars have been lost

#51

Post by revolvingthrow »

phaser wrote: post #26

> I fear for what happens when Gabe Newell retires and the MBA cancer fully infects Valve. They are making SteamOS compatible with other hardware, if you want to build a steam machine of your own. Also their contributions to Wine and Fex will enable other Linux gaming platforms that are not SteamOS to have the same compatibility layer.

Proton is already good enough that you don’t need SteamOS. I’m not that much of a gamer so my numbers are hardly representative, but about 90% of video games I tried ran with zero issues through Heroic Launcher and GE-Proton. The ability to install SteamOS on your own hardware is nice, but largely irrelevant. It was Valve’s previous work on Proton which was important.

The bigger fear is of course Valve itself. They have many, many levers they could turn to squeeze their audience. This is of course a terrible long-term decision—Valve being a good steward is why PC gamers largely don’t even bother to learn what other online storefronts offer—but long-term planning is irrelevant if you’re a CEO who’s looking for a new yacht and to lateral away after 3 years of record profits.

@edit: admittedly there is something to be said about the "I don’t _want_ a PC experience, I just want to play the games on my couch" crowd. Being able to set up SteamOS on your own hardware _is_ nice, I just don’t think it’s relevant to any post-Gaben enshittification.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#52

Post by voidUpdate »

Gigachad wrote: post #42
voidUpdate wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want the convenience. Generally , a console "just works", whereas a PC is more likely to need some messing about to get working optimally. Console devs have one target hardware that they can target, whereas PC games could be run on a huge variety of hardware

Valve has essentially fixed this in most aspects. My Steam Deck is as much of a "just works" experience as the switch. In fact I think it just works even easier because it automatically syncs my saves between my gaming desktop and it so I have the same saves when I travel. Windows is a clusterfuck, but PC is larger than Windows. Anti cheat is a problem left to solve, but I think this is just a matter of time.

Valve fixed it by making a console that plays PC games, rather than making a PC

Re: The console wars have been lost

#53

Post by mort96 »

Gigachad wrote: post #49
mort96 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're definitely way past the point where console hardware is vastly different from PC hardware; we're not in the age where what makes a console special is having a sprite processor which allows it to render graphics in a way that mainstream PC hardware is incapable of. It's all pretty much just x86 APUs from AMD, slightly customized compared to what you get off the shelf. However everything other than the hardware i…

>However everything other than the hardware is what makes consoles special. They're a special-purpose device which is specifically designed to only be used with a game pad on a big screen. That means stupid stuff like a pop-up which needs mouse interaction or the system getting confused about window focus, issues which have always plagued living room gaming PCs, just categorically can not exist. This is exactly the p…

Yeah, until you try to launch Trackmania and its launcher needs mouse input to function.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#54

Post by thdr »

nylonstrung wrote: post #3

Consoles just don't make sense in any modern context. It's profoundly wasteful to have an edge device sitting in your living room, unused for 99% of the time that can only do an incredibly small subset of what a gaming computer can Every PS5 in existence is destined to become e-waste Not to mention how bad the developer and porting experience is compared to PC/Steam Machine

I always find this argument pretty weak. Most of my household appliances are unused most of the time. And I very much value the fact that they're available for me if I want to use them. Why would I somehow want to give up that autonomy for my game console just because it happens to be connected to the internet?

I have gaming machines from the 80s that still work and that I still love. They're not e-waste.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#55

Post by andrewl-hn »

phaser wrote: post #26

> I fear for what happens when Gabe Newell retires and the MBA cancer fully infects Valve. They are making SteamOS compatible with other hardware, if you want to build a steam machine of your own. Also their contributions to Wine and Fex will enable other Linux gaming platforms that are not SteamOS to have the same compatibility layer.

It's less about platforms and more about games themselves. Games on Steam has to follow certain rules that are mostly consumer-friendly. And the fear is that some of these rules will be relaxed to increase Steam's revenue, and as a result the store will be flooded with ad-ridden gatcha-slop that is completely saturated mobile.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#56

Post by yoz-y »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #12
nylonstrung wrote: post #3

Consoles just don't make sense in any modern context. It's profoundly wasteful to have an edge device sitting in your living room, unused for 99% of the time that can only do an incredibly small subset of what a gaming computer can Every PS5 in existence is destined to become e-waste Not to mention how bad the developer and porting experience is compared to PC/Steam Machine

"Game consoles" are a niche lifestyle item for gen-X and millennials with money to waste. (Like vinyl records.) Nobody under 20 knows what a "console" is even for, they play games on their iPhone almost exclusively.

If only mobile devices had better external monitor support. It’s funny that iOS / macOS has by far the best controller experience from all devices pairing wise (even getting an Xbox controller to work properly on windows requires a dongle). iPad + controller just lacks games (and with emulators not even that, just good configuration).

Re: The console wars have been lost

#57

Post by stuxnet79 »

nylonstrung wrote: post #5
s_dev wrote: post #2

Consoles mostly died with the PlayStation 3. Consoles (At least Sony and Microsoft's offering) have become repackaged PCs for a while now this will be especially apparent with the Steamboxes going up on the same shelves as Playstations in the future. I will concede it's hard to reason or discuss about these things without getting lost in a Ship of Theseus definition of what 'console' and 'PC' is and where the lines a…

TBH the PS3 probably should have been more similar to PC, the people I've talked to who have worked for it said the architecture was a nightmare to work with. There's really no reason console games of that era needed, or even could benefit from 6 cores

Everytime this topic comes up I always replay this clip of Gabe Newell ranting about having to write multi-threaded code for the PS3 and chuckle [1]

Was writing code for the PS3 genuinely difficult or was it also a skill issue? The counter-argument I've heard is that multi threaded programming just wasn't as common at the time due to minimal number of cores available on most consumer hardware.

Perhaps the PS3 would have fared better with a different generation of developers.

[1] https://youtu.be/dKYT6NzsUZQ?si=wzf5e5iBP3MEEJEn

Re: The console wars have been lost

#58

Post by aleph_minus_one »

nylonstrung wrote: post #5
s_dev wrote: post #2

Consoles mostly died with the PlayStation 3. Consoles (At least Sony and Microsoft's offering) have become repackaged PCs for a while now this will be especially apparent with the Steamboxes going up on the same shelves as Playstations in the future. I will concede it's hard to reason or discuss about these things without getting lost in a Ship of Theseus definition of what 'console' and 'PC' is and where the lines a…

TBH the PS3 probably should have been more similar to PC, the people I've talked to who have worked for it said the architecture was a nightmare to work with. There's really no reason console games of that era needed, or even could benefit from 6 cores

> There's really no reason console games of that era needed, or even could benefit from 6 cores

First: One problem of the PS3 was that in a late stage of its development a (rather weak) GPU was "tacked on" (originally, the Cell was supposed to replace the GPU).

Now for your point:

Just have a look what scientists did on PS3 clusters using the SPUs of the Cell, and considering this imagine what creative things would have been possible for games on the PS3.

The problem was that at this time, game development got much less specific to one platform (in opposite to how it was for basically all the previous game console generations, though I am willing to admit that the original Xbox being very similar to a PC did give a hint concerning the direction the game industry was heading), so you wanted a much more "standardized" (typically meaning: similar to PC) architecture. The Xbox 360 was simply much more similar to PCs, so it was much easier to port engines from one platform to another.

> the people I've talked to who have worked for it said the architecture was a nightmare to work with.

For previous console generations this was less of a problem (basically every console was quirky). It is easy to find statements of developers on the internet how the PS2 was magnitudes more of a nightmare to develop for than the PS3.

So, before, being difficult to develop for a console was much more accepted in consideration of the unique features each console brought to the table. What did change was rather the expectation among developers to be able to easily port engines between platforms.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#59

Post by bigcityslider »

Gigachad wrote: post #24
brazzy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't think having a custom CPU and hardware architecture different from PCs is the defining property of a gaming console. Nobody cares about that except developers and hardware nerds. A console is a computer purpose-built and streamlined for playing games. No more, no less.

The line is far more blurred now. The Steam Machine is a purpose built device streamlined for playing games. Yet without any hardware modifications you can put it on your desk and load windows on it. So it's clearly a PC too. The nitpicking on language here is entirely due to the fact the distinction is no longer clear like it once was.

Doesn't seem blurry to me, Steam Machine is just a PC.

Re: The console wars have been lost

#60

Post by Delphiza »

Somewhere along the way, consoles lost where they fit into the 'living room space'. The biggest thing (for me) was when games stopped with local co-op. Having two controllers and being able to play together was a good way to spend time doing casual gaming. Lego star wars did it well. Gears of War, Halo and others used to be a good way to to spend time with your children. The Wii had all ages playing together. Now, all that you can do is play Minecraft together. I was watching my (adult0 daughter play the new Subnautica, and would like to have joined in without having to go to a different room.
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